Love Affair with Secondaries

Professor’s affair with a poet

Piotr was forty-two, married to Basia, the father of three sons, a professor of English at the Instytut Anglistyki at the University of Krakow. Three things worried him.

First, he was having an affair with Agnieszka, the poetess, who wore spectacles and looked like Nana Mouskouri.

Second, he had recently undergone a series of tests to establish whether he had inherited the family’s predisposition to die of cancer in the late forties, as his mother had done.

And, third, his blond eyebrows, always strongly marked, had gone Nietzschean almost overnight. They were the family eyebrows, his father’s eyebrows—two intense pelts, half an inch high, that made him look middle-aged. His older brother, Czeslaw, the architect, had an identical pair, but he was fifty.

There was to be a fourth thing, but as yet he knew nothing of it.

The affair with Agnieszka bothered him not because he felt guilty about Basia, his wife—though he did feel guilty—but because Agnieszka’s poetry was notorious for its candor and explicitness. Every year produced a new slim volume in which the slimness was inversely proportionate to the indiscretion. Piotr wrote poetry himself, less prolifically and more guardedly. He had written poems about his affair with Agnieszka, but his way with pathetic fallacy meant that even Basia could read them without guessing their true provenance. The nearest he had come to confessional poetry was a dramatic monologue titled “Peter the Great to His Courtesan”—in which the Tsar forbade his mistress to “rust his sword” and issued other majestically obscure imperatives.

Agnieszka’s poetry, though, had her taking off her horn-rims to kiss her lover in the Kool Kats Jazz Club or giving a blow job on the back seat of the bus to Nowa Huta. And her titles were nearly always dates and places.

One day he expected to read a poem about his eyebrows. Or a poem with his phone number or his address in the title: “Ul. Sienkiewicza 35 m.5.” Especially since his apartment was often the easiest place for the lovers to meet—as they were going to meet on this rainy day in June. He wasn’t teaching that afternoon, because his students had exams. Agnieszka walked from the nearby Film School, where she worked in the cataloguing department. His sons would be in school till four, and Basia, who worked for a foreign press agency, was never home before six o’clock, because of the time difference.

As soon as Agnieszka arrived, Piotr put the chain on the door, and the pair undressed quickly and silently on opposite sides of the sofa bed. Like a married couple in a cold room. But the thick curve of his erection was ready before they even touched. He could smell her genitals across the tartan blanket—the blanket with tell-tail tassels which she always brought in her tote bag.

She took off her spectacles.

On the sofa bed, she seldom repeated herself. This particular afternoon, as her features warped with pleasure, Piotr heard her agonized whisper, “I want to, aah, push your stiff red, aah, into another woman’s . . .” And he came, too.

Afterward, they talked, always about the same thing—Piotr’s postcoital desire to end the affair and Agnieszka’s passionate opposition. “We are like mayflies. We live only for an afternoon, and we must take whatever joy is given us.” This was the argument she always urged.

Piotr thought of the tests he had undergone—the barium meals, the endoscopies, the soreness of his throat after tubes had been pushed down it, the yellow bruise in the crook of his arm where blood had been taken. But there was also something comic in her chosen image for man’s transience—the indestructible trope of the doomed mayfly. And he thought of the character in Chekhov’s “Ivanov” who says that mankind is like a flower in a field. Along comes a goat—no more flower. The earpieces of Agnieszka’s spectacles, he noticed, were arranged around a bottle of Basia’s perfume, brought back from England by her sister. Je Reviens.

And then he heard the shtpp of Basia’s key in the lock. The chain was in place, and the snib of the lock was also depressed, so that the apartment door couldn’t be opened from the outside. Shtpp. There was a faint jingle of keys as Basia checked she was using the right one. Shtpp. Shtpp.

Piotr laid his finger against his lips—and smelled the rankness of Agnieszka’s genitals. He leaned toward her, shaking his head vigorously when she tried to kiss him. “No,” he whispered in her ear. “She’ll go away in a minute. Just wait quietly. Then you can leave.” They listened to the sibilance, not even daring to dress. A minute passed. Neither of them heard Basia’s steps descending the concrete stairs. Piotr found himself listening for the terse resonance of the steel bannister when it was slapped.

Shtpp. “Shit.” Then, raising her voice, “Piotr, are you in there?”

Basia began to thump on the door. After only a minute, the hammering stopped, and they heard the voice of the old woman in the apartment below. “He’s there with that woman he brings. It’s disgusting. You should get a divorce.”

“You should mind your own fucking business,” Basia yelled. “Piotr, open the bloody door, you shit.”

They began to get dressed. The shoulders of Agnieszka’s raincoat were still dark from the rain. She tightened the belt and looked at Piotr. He was folding away the sofa bed.

“Deny it,” he whispered. “Say we weren’t doing anything, but it looked bad, so we kept quiet. In case she came to the wrong conclusion.”

Agnieszka shook her head. “No. It’s fate, Piotr. Tell her that you love me. That you’re leaving her.” But she was pale.

“I can’t.”

Agnieszka wound up her lipstick, applied its apricot shimmer with a surprisingly steady hand, turned up the collar of her raincoat, and went to open the door. “I am not going to discuss our love with her. My conscience is clear. And yours should be, too. I’m going home. How could something so beautiful between us, something so noble, be touched by something so grubby? So undignified?”

The door opened, but there was no sign of Basia, only the head of the old woman, at floor level, staring up through the bars like a criminal.

Agnieszka stepped out and received an almighty crack to the side of her head from the handle of Basia’s red umbrella. The old woman applauded. Agnieszka did not collapse. She held on to the ochre bannister with both hands, leaning forward, as if she were keeping it at arm’s length. Her mouth opened and shut, opened and shut. Tears brimmed in her eyes.

Piotr was amazed to find himself noticing the sleeve belts on her raincoat—how they gathered the cuffs, like Christmas crackers.

Without saying a word, or even acknowledging Basia’s existence, Agnieszka walked slowly down the stairs.

To Piotr’s gradual surprise, Agnieszka made no attempt to contact him after she was hit on the side of the head with the rosewood handle of Basia’s umbrella.

What did he expect? Obviously, she couldn’t phone him at home. He thought that she would phone him at work. Even if there was no one else in the common room—marking papers or drying shoes at the wall heater—he would adopt his customary neutral tone. His responses would be inconsequential. To her question “Why can’t you meet me on Friday night?,” he would answer, “No, I don’t think it’s arrived yet.” Or she would ask, “Do you want to fuck me?” And he’d reply, “Not all the work has been completed yet, but yes, as far as I know, that’s the case.” He thought this strategy might help to contain her outrage.

But Agnieszka didn’t phone. He could, of course, phone her. In some ways, that would be better, because she shared an office at the Film School with only one other colleague, an older, divorced woman whom she’d taken into her confidence. The truth was that Piotr was afraid of her anger at his timidity, at the way he had stood to one side—silent in the curious silence after the blow. That curt, wordless, forceful dak.

Perhaps, he reasoned, she didn’t wish to add to the pressure he was under? It was unlikely: Agnieszka had no way of knowing that Basia had summoned the entire family to a discussion of his infidelity.

And, in any case, Agnieszka’s consideration for others wasn’t often evident. It wasn’t selfishness but, rather, a principled egoism. She believed in the truth of her emotions. The important thing was not to live a lie. Other people, consideration for other people, putting their feelings first, inevitably meant putting your own feelings second. Hell is other people, Sartre said. But Agnieszka’s conviction was unrelated to existentialist ideas of inauthenticity and mauvaise foi. She could imagine telling a lie in order to live in the truth.

The concept of “poetic truth” appealed to her—the idea of something not literally true but nevertheless ideally true. The slow thistledown of stars, for example, their drift and cling, was something that struck her with renewed force whenever she removed her spectacles—and was looking over a lover’s shoulder at the Milky Way. Her favorite poet was Marina Tsvetayeva.

A week passed before she finally telephoned—to tell Piotr that the blow delivered by the umbrella handle had produced first a lump, expected by Agnieszka and therefore unsurprising, and then a tumor. Which was aggressive, according to the doctor. She had wanted to be quite certain before she telephoned. That was why she’d waited. Her voice was steady and her tone factual.

Piotr stared up at the institute ceiling, with its elaborate nineteenth-century moldings and the Greek islands of damp. He could see nothing for the pulsing blackness that shrouded his vision. He was finding it difficult to breathe. There was no saliva in his mouth.

“Piotr?”

When he tried to speak, he could manage only a whisper. “Agnieszka.” Her name in his mouth sounded like the scratch of a fountain pen.

“I can’t hear you.”

“I was saying your name.” He began to breathe at last, but his voice was unsteady. “Tell me what happened.”

“You know what happened.”

“At the doctor’s.”

“He says I should expect secondaries. It will metastasize.”

“So is there going to be surgical intervention? Radium? Or chemo? What tests did he run?”

There was a long pause. “No. It’s hopeless, he says. A death sentence.”

“See another doctor. Agnieszka, you’ve got to see another doctor.”

“I want to die. There’s nothing to live for now.”

Piotr was shocked to find himself more worried about his wife than about Agnieszka. Somewhere in his mind, he already thought of it as a vindictive tumor. And he wanted to know if Agnieszka had been to the police, whether his wife might be facing some kind of criminal charge, and how exactly it would be framed. But he did not dare ask directly, in case he put the idea in her head.

“I have to see you,” he said in a low voice, without thinking, as if there were someone else in the empty common room.

“Only if you spend the rest of my life with me.”

“The arrangements for that shipment will require detailed advance planning,” he said.

“Is there someone there?” she asked.

“That is the correct state of affairs. The arrangements for that shipment—”

Agnieszka hung up with a clatter. And she didn’t telephone again.

Basia was frying chicken livers and onions in the tiny kitchen when he told her about Agnieszka’s tumor. She kept her back to him as he stood in the doorway. These days she seldom glanced in his direction, much less looked him in the eye. She took a pinch of salt with her right hand, rubbed a trickle into the pan, and beat her hands clean like a pair of cymbals.

“I’d take it with a pinch of salt, that tumor of hers.”

“Basia, I have to see her.”

“See her.”

On the wet chopping board, a few bloody shreds, seasoned flour with a red sticky edge.

“She might go to the police,” he said.

“Or a lawyer, more likely. See her. Find out.”

“You don’t believe her, do you?”

“Doesn’t matter either way. Whether she’s lying. Which she is. Or if it’s the truth, in which case she’ll die before the case is settled.”

“What if it’s a criminal case? What if it isn’t a civil action?”

“Lay the table.”

Basia was tempted to tell Piotr about her own lover.

Just to balance the hurt. But she ate without lifting her eyes from the plate.

The reason Basia never told Piotr about her lover was that by then they were no longer lovers. Witold had found someone else—a man. Also Basia was deeply persuaded by her own inherent disposition toward fidelity. Fidelity, as she perceived it, wasn’t something literal and pedantic. It was a fundamental mental posture, the essential truth. More, her righteous indignation with Piotr would be compromised if she indulged her instinct for revenge and sexual counterstrike. As it was, she could count on everyone’s sympathy. The family conference about Piotr’s infidelity took place one Sunday afternoon in his brother Czeslaw’s new apartment on the outskirts of Warsaw. It was also the architect’s fifty-first birthday. The seal on the frosted bottle of Zubrowka was broken with a click—of plectrum on fingernail. Piotr thought of Agnieszka performing her poems, with her head bent over her guitar like a nursing mother. He listened, reproved, to the rustle, the sigh of the foil cap and the single tut-tut it took to pour a glass. Soon the white carved wooden tray would hold eight squat glasses—their clarity iced to ground glass—which would leave broken links of damp on the wood.

Fuck all this pathetic fucking pathetic fallacy, Piotr thought.

Czeslaw hadn’t yet put up curtains. On the twentieth floor they hardly seemed essential. Piotr looked down at the builders’ rubble and the canopy of cow parsley flourishing between the blocks of new flats. He turned back to the room for the birthday toast.

The vodka made for frankness. Basia’s parents sat in their coats. Her father looked down and turned his flat cap to the right like a steering wheel. They were both hurt and surprised by his behavior. They would find it hard to forgive him.

“His eczema’s back on his legs. That’s what it means.” It was Basia, defending him against her parents. He looked up gratefully, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. She was stern, yet in a strange way looked more vulnerable than usual. Younger. Touching.

Piotr realized that she wasn’t wearing eye makeup.

He felt outmaneuvered. Clean shaven. Normal. Criminal. Why had he agreed to this ludicrous show trial?

“What we want to know, isn’t it, is what he intends to do about it.” It was his mother-in-law again.

Piotr wondered why Basia’s mother never mentioned the time—almost twenty years ago now, at a New Year’s party—when she had kissed her future son-in-law and put her tongue in his mouth. He had been standing with his arms folded outside the bathroom when she came out, saw him, kissed him expertly, then rejoined the party. Piotr hadn’t been in the least surprised, actually. They were drunk, but it wasn’t a drunken kiss. It had seemed perfectly natural—proper, even—an acknowledgment of an ordinary fact. It was never repeated, never alluded to, written off by both as an alcoholic indiscretion. But the eidetic spark of mutual attraction had been there for the first five years of his marriage and had only gradually faded. They used to get on well, Piotr and his mother-in-law.

Edward, Piotr’s younger, unmarried brother, said nothing. His sister, Nadia, also said nothing. She had parted from her husband over a similar affair and sat there like a reproach and a warning.

Piotr’s father and Czeslaw spoke of the temptation, the vanity of the male. Piotr knew that they were defending him, but their generic argument offended his sense of individuality. He wasn’t flattered by the gift of Agnieszka’s youth and beauty. It wasn’t his vanity that drove him—it was his mortality. He didn’t want to remain young. He wanted to be alive before he died. That was all.

“The kid’s told me how sorry he is,” Czeslaw concluded. “And I think that’s pretty obvious. He doesn’t want to risk losing Basia and the kids. They’re the most important thing in his life. He knows that.”

And Czeslaw put his arm around Piotr’s shoulders. “A toast. A toast to Piotr and Basia.”

But later, walking in the wasteland between the new apartment blocks, Czeslaw was less friendly. “You stupid cunt. What the fuck did you think you were doing, you prick?” The elder brother dressing down the younger. They faced each other. Czeslaw tore the cigarette out of Piotr’s mouth. “Smoking. Why are you fucking smoking? You are so stupid. You don’t fucking smoke.”

“You made my lip bleed.” Piotr touched his lower lip and looked at his finger.

“I don’t give a fuck about your fucking lip.” Czeslaw threw the cigarette on the grass and ground it to pieces.

Both men were slightly breathless, as if they had been running up stairs. Piotr wondered why Czeslaw was so angry.

Piotr could smell cheese on Czeslaw’s breath. He wanted to cry. He wasn’t sure he could trust himself to speak.

“O.K.,” he said. “I’ll try to explain.” But his voice kept vanishing. “The tests I had. Because of Ma.” He shook his head. His eyes looked up to the right. His mouth stretched.

“Take it easy, Piotr. Easy now.” There were tears in Czeslaw’s voice, too.

“The point is. The point is. Shit. With her. I just think about her. Her cunt.” He was staring at Czeslaw’s lavish tie knot. “I want to live, you know. Before I die. And she understands that.” Piotr looked up and met his brother’s gray eyes under the tangle of eyebrows. “Agnieszka says we’re like mayflies. We only live for an afternoon.”

Something changed in Czeslaw’s eyes. A point of light.

“I don’t know whether I should tell you this, our kid.” Czeslaw pushed his lips forward, ruefully. “Anyway. But that’s exactly what she said to me when I was fucking her.”

The two brothers shook their heads and smiled at each other.

“Incredible.”

“It is. Fucking incredible.”

And they starting comparing notes about Agnieszka in bed.

Three weeks later, the affair began again. In spite of everything. And in spite of everything Piotr still believed that we are mayflies who only live for an afternoon.